w 



' 



-. 



{LIBRARY OF CONGRESS.} 

$ 

I UNITED STATES OF AMERICA. } 






X 



The Results of the Presidential Election. 



SPEECH 



HON. BENJAMIN M. BOYER, 



OF PENNSYLVANIA, 



REPLY TO HON. JAMES G. BLAINE; 



D SLIVERED 



IN THE HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES, 



JANUARY 8, 1860, 






£L__1S _ 






WASHINGTON: 
F. & J. RIVES & GEO. A. BAILEY, 

REPORTERS AND PRINTERS OF THE DEBATES OF CONGRESS. 
18G9. 



E&G& 

•3Y) 



X 



The Results of the Presidential Election. 



The House being in Committee of the Whole on the 
Btato of the Union — 

Mr. BOYER said : 

Mr. Chairman : The issues supposed to 
have been settled by the election of General 
Grant to the Presidency formed the subject 
of an elaborate speech by the honorable gen- 
tleman from Maine [Mr. Blaine] a few days 
before the adjournment of Congress for the 
holidays in December. The assumptions of 
the gentleman on that occasion, which differ 
materially from my own conclusions, have 
suggested the brief remarks which I propose 
to make upon this the first opportunity I have 
had for a reply. Nor is this an idle discussion ; 
for what has been clearly and fairly determined 
by a general election ought to be acquiesced 
in as the declared will of the people, binding 
upon the minority and regulating the official 
duty of those elected by the majority. 

The late presidential election decided, of 
course, that the Republican party should con- 
tinue to administer the Government through 
an elected Chief Magistrate of their own choice 
»nd a majority of the Forty-First Congress. 
But it settled scarcely anything else than what 
is practically inseparable from such a result. 
The election, in fact, turned upon a false and 
imaginary is.^ue. as I shall presently show, by 
which the Republican party succeeded in avoid- 
ing a direct verdict of the people upon the real 
questions involved in the policy upon which 
they had administered the Government. By 
the same means they avoided, as far as possi- 
ble, committal upon any question which could 



be referred to the future. As an example of 
the latter, as well as an illustration of the un- 
warranted assumptions of the gentleman from 
Maine, take the subject of the finances. In 
the speech to which I have adverted the gen- 
tlemau said "the election of General Grant 
has settled the financial question." Settled 
it how? Why, says the gentleman, "it has 
settled that the public debt shall be paid in the 
utmost good faith, accordiug to the letter and 
spirit of the contract." 

This, to be sure, is in the very words of the 
Chicago platform, and neither more nor less 
explicit. But when and by what party was it 
ever made a question whether the national 
debt should not be paid in the utmost good 
faith and according to the letter and spirit of 
the contract? What is good faith and what 'he 
letter and spirit of the contract are the very 
points of the controversy, and upon these the 
Republican platform and the enunciations of 
General Grant leave us as much as ever in the 
dark. The late Thaddeus Stevens, whose lead- 
ership of the Republican majority in this House 
was conspicuous, and who was in his lifetime 
as much entitled to speak for the Republican 
party as the gentleman from Maine, declared 
in one of his last speeches in this Hall that the 
Republican platform meant that "the bloated 
bondholders," as he styled the holders of five- 
twenties, should be paid in currency and not 
in gold. But this, says Horace Greeley, is 
"villainy." And so thinks the gentleman 
from Maine. Cn the other hand, an honor- 
able Senator, [Mr. Morton,] a high Repub- 



lican authority, and prominently named even 
for the Secretaryship of the Treasury under the 
new Administration, maintains that to pay the 
bonds in currency is a clear legal right accord- 
ing to the contract. The gentleman from Mas- 
sachusetts, [Mr. Butler,] who will concede 
nothing in Republican orthodoxy even to the 
gentleman from Maine, goes further, and says 
that to pay in greenbacks is not only a legal 
right but a moral duty. 

In reference to the question touching the 
resumption of specie payment we discover the 
same confusion among the Republican oracles. 
"Let resumption come at once," says the 
venerable editor of the Tribune in his late let- 
ter addressed to the distinguished Republican 
Senator already referred to. " Wages must 
fall, property sell cheaper or be unsalable, the 
sheriff and constable be after many of us. We 
must suffer any how. But," continues he with 
heroic emphasis, "I prefer to take the plunge 
atonce and be done with it." " But," retorts 
the honorable Senator, "you may be ready to 
make the plunge, but the great body of the 
people are not. Postpone till 1871." "Post- 
pone indefinitely," says the gentleman from 
Massachusetts. It appears from this that the 
interpretation of the settlement of the financial 
question by the election of General Grant is 
attended with as much confusion of tongues as 
prevailed among the artificers of Babel. The 
fact is that the election has left the financial 
question practically where it found it. All 
that the election has certainly settled in rela- 
tion thereto is that the party which has swelled 
the national debt by unprecedented extrava- 
gance and deranged the currency by unwise 
legislation shall, for at least two years longer, 
shoulder the responsibility of providing a rem- 
edy. The financial elephant, for the present, is 
their prize. So much of finance has been 
settled by the' diction of General Grant, and 
nothing more. 

The gentleman lays it down as an inevitable 
consequence of General Grant's election that | 
negro suffrage must be accepted as a perma- 
ishmetit in the southern States, 
"and at ho distant day throughout the entire 
UnioD." Yet if negro suffrage, which is the 
very corner >v bf Radical reconstruction, 
hid licon divested of all other issues ami fairly 



submitted to the vote of the whole people, 
what man acquainted with the national senti- 
ment will deny that its defeat would have been 
overwhelming ? No other proof is needed to 
establish this proposition than the decisive vote 
upon this question when lately presented by 
itself in several of the great Republican States 
of the North and the continued exclusion of 
negroes from the polls in nearly all of them. 

It is said, however, that negro suffrage " is 
of necessity conceded as one of the essentials 
of reconstruction." But has the Radical policy 
of reconstruction itself been so approved and 
established that it can never be disturbed by 
future elections ? Is there nothing to be appre- 
hended from the continued violation of nat- 
ural laws and a possible collision of races? 
Are the reconstruction laws themselves so 
firmly intrenched upon constitutional grounds 
that a general revulsion of feeling among the 
superior race might not find a ready excuse for 
sweeping from its foundationsthe whole work of 
Radical reconstruction? Radicalism has not 
itself been overscrupulous in the use of means. 
Usurpation is a dangerous game for any party 
to play if it would have its work outlast the 
passions from which it derived its power to 
tyrannize and proscribe. 

Of course, the late elections have continued 
in the hands of the Republican party the power 
to enforce their policy for two year3 longer. 
But now, since the election of General Grant 
has in the eyes of all men insured the safety 
of the Union, there will be less excuse for 
sectional and personal proscription. Those 
caricatures of republican government imposed 
by the stranger and the negro upon the dis- 
franchised white race of the South had become 
abhorrent to the public mind of the North 
long before the late presidential election. But 
the shadowy ghost of an extinct rebellion filled 
the popular imagination with false alarms 
and frightened it from that forgiveness which 
had become both safe and merciful. In so far. 
therefore, as the late elections have continued 
the power of Radicalism it was a verdict ex- 
torted from the fears of the people rather than 
their judgment upon the merits of the Radical 
policy. Public confidence turned to Grant as 
the urtgos'pected representative of a triumph- 
ant Union, and the Republican party was 



saved through him alone. Had he been the 
candidate of the Opposition, whom could rad- 
icalism have elected over him? Look to the 
October elections. Let the imminent danger 
which threatened radicalism, even with Grant 
as its candidate, answer the question. No other 
name given under heaven among men could 
have saved the Republican party from over- 
whelming defeat and final condemnation. Y\ as 
it because Grant was the representative of 
Radicalism that worked this great salvation ? 
Everybody knows better. Radicalism had 
been already repudiated, as the State and 
municipal elections in the North had for two 
years indicated. Even after the sagacious 
nomination at Chicago the handwriting was 
still seen on the wall. Even over against the 
name of Grant, resplendent as it was with mil- 
itary glory, the gathering cloud of threatened 
disaster lowered. There were names before 
the Democratic National Convention at New 
York which thrilled with apprehension the 
Republican heart every time the electric wires 
Mashed through the land the Democratic roll- 
call of the States. 

I shall not pause to review the blunders from 
which others reaped a harvest which they did 
not sow. Nor shall I calculate how many grains 
of common sense were needed in the balance in 
which Democratic victory was that day weighted 
down. I only refer to the irrevocable past for 
the lesson which it teaches to your party, Mr. 
Chairman, rather than to mine. The argument 
which I desire to draw from it is this : that the 
elements of Republican success at the late elec- 
tions were derived from other sources than the 
popular approval of the Radical policy. It was 
the misfortune of my party, Mr. Chairman, to 
expose itself to misrepresentation. It was the 
fortune of yours to take advantage of it, and to 
be permitted to inscribe with popular approba- 
tion the winning words, " Let us have peace " 
upon the banners of the party which had for 
nearly four years in a time of profound peace 
continued the worst consequences of war. Rut 
the glaring contradiction was not regarded, and 
everywhere the Republican press and the Re- 
publican orators proclaimed to the people that 
the real question was whether the rebellion 
should be renewed by a victorious Democracy, 
or peace and union insured by the election of 



General Grant. And now, baring answered 
its purpose, false and imaginary as the issue 
was, T insist that it shall he held within tint scope 
of its logical application, and I maintain that 
nothing ought to be considered a s. -tiled by 
the election of General Grant except that the 
rebellion shall not be renewed. 

But, said the gentleman from Maine, ri 
higher in his flight toward the regions of pure 
imagination, " With the election of General 
Grant comes a higher standard of American 
citizenship, with more dignity and character 
to the name abroad and more assured liberty 
and security attaching to it at home." Iligh 
sounding phrases, indeed. But no new stand- 
ard of citizenship has been set up by General 
Grant, and if we are compelled to seek for this 
boasted standard of American citizenship in 
the reconstruction policy of Congress, what do 
we find? Taking up the latest illustration of 
Radical reconstruction, the constitution just 
prepared and ready to be fastened upon the 
people of Virginia, (twenty-five thousand of 
whom are excluded from the polls this day,) I 
read in it that no inhabitant of that State shall 
hold any State office unless he first takes an oath 
to recognize and accept the political equality of 
the negro. Neither shall any one who will not 
take this oath be qualified to serve on a jury. 

1 find in the constitution of Alabama, rejected 
by the people of that State, but afterward, nev- 
ertheless, imposed upon them by Congress, the 
same oath prescribed as a condition -precedent 
to the registration of a voter. The same test 
for the qualification of a voter exists in Arkansas 
and in Louisiana, and in the constitution pro- 
posed for Mississippi, the temporary rejection 
of which has led to the contiuued exclusion of 
the latter State from representation in Con- 
gress. Georgia having been admitted to rep- 
resentation, is now threatened with expulsion 
unless she will allow negroes to sit in her Legis- 
lature. 

In some form in all the reconstructed States 
of the South fidelity to the dogma of a party 
is thus made the test of American citizenship. 
Upon condition of allegiance to the Repub- 
lican party, however, all former rebels against 
the Government, however red-handed, are to 
be forgiven and exalted. The constitution of 
Arkansas, for example, provides that certain 



classes of ex-rebels shall not register as voters, 
including those, in express terms, who during 
the late rebellion violated the rules of civilized 
warfare. But all of them shall vote notwith- 
standing, even those who, in violation of the 
rules of civilized warfare, deliberately mur- 
dered Union prisoners in cold blood, or helped 
to destroy them by lingering tortures in prison 
pens, "provided" — and I now quote the very 
words of the constitution approved by Con- 
gress — "provided that all persons included," 
lie, (in the disfranchised classes) "who have 
openly advocated, or who have voted for the re- 
construction proposed by Congress, and accept 
the equality of all men before the law shall be 
deemed qualified electors under this constitu- 
tion.'' 

If we turn to the constitution of Louisiana 
we find similar proscriptions and pardons. No 
traitor is there too black for Radical absolu- 
tion provided lie will swear that the negro is his 
political equal, and he can ventilate his loyalty 
under that clause of the Louisiana constitution 
which takes all the disfranchised Radicals out of 
t he lists of the proscribed by the accommodating 
proviso "that no person who, prior to the 1st 
of .January, 1868, favored the execution of the 
laws of the United States popularly known as 
the reconstruction acts of Congress, and openly 
and actively assisted the loyal men of the 
State (to wit, the Radicals) in their efforts 
to restore Louisiana to her position in the 
Union, shall be held to be included among 
those herein excepted.*' Among the pro- 
scribed I Grid those who in the advocacy of 
the rebellion wrote or published a newspaper 
article or preached a sermon during the war. 
They shall not vote in Louisiana unless they 
are in favor of the reconstruction policy of 
Congress, and swear to the doctrine of negro 
equality. But they who, in the advocacy of 
tr< ason, wrote it in bloody characters with their 
swords and preached sermons against the 
Union through the cannon's mouth, they 
I, nevertheless, be clothed with all the 
attributes of citizenship in the State, provided 
they will swear allegiance to negro equality, 
willing lo aid in the enforce- 
mstruction. 

In further illustration of these sublime tests 
of loyally and citizenship, in their operat.iou 



even upon northern men, let me suppose a 
case, of which there may be many examples 
now and likely to be many more hereafter. 
Suppose a northern citizen of the United 
States, who, as a volunteer soldier of the Union 
Army during the civil war, had done his share 
toward the redemption of our common coun- 
try, and, with the idea of improving his for- 
tunes, should emigrate to one of the southern 
States — to Arkansas, for example, or to Louis- 
iana. After residing there the requisite time, 
suppose he were to offer to register as a voter. 
The first test of qualification to which he would 
be subjected would be the oath in favor of ne- 
gro equably. If, by reason of his conviction* 
of the unsoundness and impolicy of the doc- 
trine of negro equality, he could not conscien- 
tiously take the oath, disfranchisement, would 
be the inevitable penalty. Nor would a shat- 
tered constitution, broken down in the service 
of his country, nor a limb lost, it may be, in 
fighting the battles of the Union, save him 
from being driven from the polls. But not so 
would it happen under the new dispensation 
to the rebel who had shed the blood and shot 
off the limb of this disfranchised Union soldier. 
The rebel can vote, however red his hand has 
been with Union blood, provided he is willing 
to swear that he is politically no better than a 
negro, and has advocated and voted for the 
reconstruction policy of Congress. Beneath 
the level of such a yoke, and through such par- 
tisan crevices must hundreds of thousands of 
disfranchised white men creep before they can 
become the political equals of the negro or 
make their present fidelity to their country uf 
any avail. 

Such are the new tests of loyalty and suffrage 
which Radical reconstruction has prescribed, 
exemplifying that higher standard of Ameri- 
can citizenship which thegentleman from Maine 
st) grandiloquently prefigured. 

By such tenures is American citizenship held 
in more than ten States of the Federal Union. 
Such are the standards prescribed by a party 
which retains power by the votes of black bar- 
barians and the wholesale disfranchisement of 
white conservatives. It can no longer be said 
that the three hundred thousand white men 
who have been stripped of their rights of cit- 
izenship by the acts of this Congress are thus 



degraded because of their former rebellion. 
This will not be believed when enabling acts 
are constantly being passed by Congress re- 
moving the political disabilities of subservient 
rebels by hundreds and thousands, while from 
these bills of amnesty the name of every sus- 
pected conservative is first carefully expunged, 
as if he were afflicted with political leprosy. 
The ironclad oath has long ago become but a 
spike upon which to impale conservatives. 
There are Representatives from southern 
States with seats on this floor, in full fellow- 
ship and communion with the Radical major- 
ity, from whose bodies the Union bullets have 
never been extracted, and who bear upon 
their persons the scars of wounds received in 
their desperate endeavors to capture and de- 
stroy this very Capitol where, as loyal men, 
they now sit in judgment. They succeeded in 
capturing the Capitol, not with rebel bullets, 
but by the aid of Radical ballots. 

I have no charges to make against these 
gentlemen. I complain not of their presence 
here, for I am in favor of universal amnesty. 
But that they should be here to the exclusion 
of others, not by virtue of their obedience to 
the laws and their renewed allegiance to the 
Union, but solely because they have pros- 
trated themselves before the Radical idol 
and shout the shibboleth of a party, conveys 
to the mind no very exalted idea of the ad- 
vancing standard of impartial American citi- 
zenship. 

To affirm that this condition of things has 
received the deliberate approval of either Gen- 
eral Grant or of the majority which elected him 
I believe to be a slander against both. 

Among those things lost with the "lost 
cause " by the defeat of Mr. Seymour, the gen- 
tleman enumerates what he is pleased to term 
"the paradise of State rights." 

If, however, it be claimed as one of the re- 
sults of the late election that States have no 
longer any rights which the Federal power is 
bound to respect, there will be many a fierce 
struggle before the party of centralization will 
be left in undisputed possession of the Govern- 
ment. Secession was a heresy which threat- 
ened the existence of the Union, but the 
denial to the States of those reserved rights 
which clearly lie on their side of the line, de- 



liniug the constitutional jurisdiction of the 
Federal authority, would destroy the symmetry 
and distinguishing excellence of our institu- 
tions, to preserve which would be worth as 
great a sacrifice as the suppression of the re- 
bellion against the Union itself. 

I know not through what future convulsions 
the ultimate destiny of the Republic is to be 
wrought out, nor how far the new President, 
naturally conservative and sagacious, may be 
willing and able to aid in the restoration of 
fraternal feeling and public confidence through- 
out all sections. I know not how successfully 
General Grant may be able to check the waste- 
ful extravagance of the public expenditures 
and aid in the restoration of a sound currency, 
and open up before the eyes of his anxious 
and tax-burdened countrymen a prospect of 
the early reduction of the public debt by the 
practice of that economy which is so essential, 
but to which, under the republican rule, the 
country has been so long a stranger. Nor can 
I tell how far, if he should in all these things 
be disposed to act for his country instead of 
his party, he will regard his obligations to the 
latter paramount if they should happen to dis- 
agree with the former. He has hitherto been 
credited with views broader and more national 
than the policy of his party. Considering 
how immeasurably the Republican party is his 
debtor he can well afford to preserve his indi- 
viduality. He need not sink, unless he chooses, 
into the mere stalking horse of party, the mere 
dispenser of party patronage — the gilded figure- 
head in a State pageant, like a doge of Venice, 
subject to his council of ten. If he is ambitious 
to crown his warlike fame with enduring civic 
renown he will be far more than all this. He 
can be more than all this without having attrib- 
uted to him any special love for the party that 
voted against him. He will, it must be ex- 
pected, give the offices to the men who voted 
him into the Presidency. Nor can he be ex- 
pected to betray any of the pledges which his 
Republican candidacy have fairly imposed 
upon him. But he is too wise not to see that 
he owes to the Republican party the nomina- 
tion alone. They owe him everything beside. 
Without him they would have been nothing, 
and they know it. 

In view of these considerations it is compli- 



mentary to him to doubt how far he will sub- 
mit his official locks to be shorn by the Radical 
Delilah, and allow himself to be bound by the 
withes of the civil tenure law or by any new 
inventions, which upon the first exhibition of 
independent action on his part, Congress may 
deem it expedient to devise for his restriction. 
It would be in accordance at least with the 
popular conception of his characterise should 
defend with resolution the constitutional pre- 
rogatives of his office. If he were to imitate 
Congress he might even go beyoud this, and 
become a law unto himself. 

When by his official utterances the new Presi- 
dent shall have broken his sphinx-like silence, 
and revealed a policy of his own, then, and not 



till then, can it be safely asserted how much 
or how little has been accomplished by the 
election of General Grant. 

The great constitutional and national party 
to which I belong, numbering in its ranks this 
day, notwithstanding the election of General 
Grant, a majority of the white people of the 
entire country, will continue to move on, never 
despairing of the Republic, faithful to its great 
mission and strong in its abiding convictions 
of right. It will never cease its effortsuntil,with 
or without the aid of Geueral Grant, it shall be- 
hold the civil law supreme throughout the land, 
and this nation again united as one people with 
the equality, dignity, and rights of the several 
States reestablished and secured. 



